How to Create a Good MCVE (Minimal Complete Verifiable Example) – Java, SQL and jOOQ.

Reporting a bug takes time, and trust me, every vendor appreciates your reporting of a bug! Your voice counts as many voices, for all the other customers of a product who do not want to or cannot take the time to report the same bug are numerous.

So, first off, thanks for taking that time and reaching out to us vendors. We really appreciate your help!

Having said so, reporting a bug can be a tedious exercise. For both parties, the one reporting the bug and the one receiving it. There are extremely simple bugs, such as typos in documentation. They can be easily pointed to and just as easily be fixed. There are much trickier bugs, such as concurrency issues in complicated project setups. They take time to reproduce. This is why an MCVE (Minimal Complete Verifiable Example) is so useful. The linked stack overflow page explains why it is so useful to answer questions. But the same arguments apply when reporting a bug.

And that’s where the tricky part starts. It isn’t easy to create an example that is:

Minimal: Your real world application code is huge. You cannot dump the entirety of it to the vendor for various reasons. And the vendor cannot look through it all to try to reproduce it. So, the problem has to be isolated into an example of minimal scope, with no unnecessary additional functionality. That’s hard too, because your project has been set up months or years ago. You don’t want to spend too much time setting up a new project

Complete: When reducing the problem to a minimal one, we’re tempted to just describe it in prose. But that can be difficult as well, because prose is hardly complete. It’s difficult to describe a problem when it would be quite easy to show the code. But that brings us back to the minimal part. We want to show only the relevant code, not all of it.

Verifiable: Ultimately, the ideal example can be used by the vendor to reproduce the problem, because once that’s possible, the vendor can start debugging it and finding the right spots to fix quite easily. Otherwise, it’s just guessing and going back and forth with the reporter, just to write more prose. That’s tiring on both sides.

This is why we now have an example project on GitHub to help you create that MCVE:

This example can be forked on GitHub and modified by you directly, in order to show how to reproduce your issue. In the future, we’ll add more example setups that may be helpful to reproduce your specific issue.

Thanks again for taking the time to report issues. We vendors really appreciate your work!